I’ve spent the last four months reading about 120 papers (roughly one academic work each morning), with a few goals in mind.
One goal was to purposefully shift my mindset from consultant to student.
As a consultant and someone doing design work, my focus is largely aimed at delivery of work product. That product needs to be high quality: it needs to deliver value. That gets a little complicated because with strategy work on short-term projects, value is probably going to be less about immediate financial rewards. Instead, value is based on things like ensuring a client feels that they received benefit from what they “bought.” Success is entirely based on externalities (maybe with the small exception of hitting the deadlines, budget, and the other operational parts of the project.)
As a student, my focus really should be on learning things, and as a PhD student, on contributing knowledge to others who want to learn the same things. I think it inverts the direction of value; if professional practice was 90/10 aimed at external judgment, success is now 90/10 based on internal knowledge production.
I think I have achieved that mindset shift, although not necessarily in terms of that success metric. I’m still largely motivated by producing some sort of work product, and maybe more than I should be. But at least for the majority of this prior-to-school investigation, I have really been motivated by knowing new things.
Another goal was to focus my initial topic direction a little more, so that it is tractable and so I can study it meaningfully. I started with the idea of exploring creativity and making things, to understand why making things leads to so much personal growth and satisfaction. That has moved through creativity, to design education and educational models, to the studio, to critique. Critique was purposefully a side-trip, but the larger studio context isn’t, and that is where I’m landing. There’s been a very large amount of work already completed that has focused on how design happens, and how reflection occurs through practice in the studio. I’m going to explore the cultural student-to-student aspects of studio learning, instead. That’s interesting to me in a number of practical ways, and I think there’s a small little gap in academic knowledge that I can contribute to and offer real value to other educators. So, I think I have completed that goal of focus, too. The “space of inquiry” diagrams helped me a lot here, and I’ll continue to take that approach every few weeks or so.
A third goal was to establish a way of working. This wasn’t overt and I wasn’t really aware of it as a goal, but in retrospect, I think I’ve come up with a very effective way for me to manage this type of “job of learning.” Morning writing has helped me. I’m very happy with my process of reading papers, publishing to the site, excerpting and auto-publishing to Miro, theming, positioning, analyzing, interpreting, and writing. I made a conscious effort to focus day-to-day on summary writing rather than critical analysis, saving most critical thinking and interpretation for when I’m working on publishable material. This worked well. I’m feeling less confident in the material selection process itself, though. I find myself hammering on JSTOR and Scholar, or somewhat aimlessly following citations, so I have work to do there. I also don’t have a great way of managing the backlog of things I want to read. Zotero isn’t doing it for me, and a bunch of pdfs in a folder isn’t, either.
A big goal here was to get in the mindset of reading academic writing, and I achieved that. I know pretty much exactly what to expect in terms of format, cadence and style. I can work through these papers quickly or slowly, depending on what I want to accomplish. It is a pretty straight-forward shift from reading long-form, or non-academic, or pulp fiction. I started my summaries heavy on my opinion of the actual writing style and approach, and I’m glad I was self-aware enough to realize the problems with that. I tried to temper it mid-way through this process, and I think I was more or less successful there.
However… here are some negative reflections I’ve had of the content itself.
I’ve become aware of the “thin slicing” phenomenon I had heard about several times, and it’s so weird and not-very-useful. I ran across many papers by the same authors that were nearly identical, but published under different titles and in different journals. These had a slight difference, maybe emphasizing one part of a study more than another, but the language for the bulk of the papers was nearly identical. I get the sense that the academy is more or less okay with this as an approach, but it’s disappointing—I would find an article that sounded interesting, get a few pages into it, and realize that I had essentially already read 80% of it.
I’ve also noticed that about the first third of the content in nearly all of the design education papers I read was nearly identical. It seems to be because the authors feel the need to show expertise in background, context and method before offering their contribution. Maybe this is to get through peer review, or maybe because they want the paper to stand alone. Either way, reading about Schon over and over is really tiring. I get it, his work was instrumental. I wish there was a way for an author to say “Insert Schon and Simon and Bauhaus and École des Beaux-Arts and Dewey here” and then just skip it. The grounding of the papers in a Big Liberal Arts Topic is also interesting and slightly repetitive, too. Authors, at least the ones I’ve been reading, seem to love Freire and Foucault and Bourdieu (and again, Dewey.) It’s interesting to see how ritualistic ways of writing like that (and with the same references to the same usual suspects over and over) shows up. Another pattern is the Our Field Is In Crisis, Here’s Lot Of Citations, I Made A Framework, We Should Consider Using It In Teaching. It’s also curious and also tedious.
I’m unchallenged now in the material I have in my backlog of papers, and that means it’s time to move on to other entry points into the work, or take a break from this process (just in time to drive across the country.) I’m glad classes are starting. I’m most excited about my first independent study, where I’ll put together a plan to actually conduct some research.